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November 2, 2003
REVIEWS: Imperialist game-plan against Punjab?
It is axiomatic that the British in India were exploiters par excellence. A nation of petty shopkeepers, in their most apposite Napoleonic description, they knew exactly what side their bread was buttered. They had come to India in the garb of thieving merchants and went overboard in their ruthless loot and plunder of its fabled wealth.
The first recipient in India of Britain’s rapacious imperialism was Bengal, which had also put up the fiercest opposition to the imperialist lust for plunder. Lord Cornwallis, defeated and disgraced in the ‘colonies’ in North America, presided over the devilish plan of breaking up the power of Muslim landed aristocracy in Bengal. Under his ‘Permanent Settlement’, Cornwallis targeted the Muslim nobility’s vast land holdings and sold them off to the Hindu banyas who had cash aplenty to fill Engand’s treasury. The Muslims in Bengal could never recover from that mortal blow.
However, for Punjab — the second-largest Muslim majority region of India — the imperialists and empire-builders devised an entirely different scheme of exploitation. Punjab was not naturally fertile and rich in water resources as Bengal. Therefore, the British decided to bring its arid lands under cultivation through an extensive network of irrigation canals that channelled the waters of Punjab’s five great rivers to lands parched for them. In its technical merit, the scheme was ingenious. But it was disingenuous and highly dubious in its imperialist implications. It was as grand a game-plan of exploitation as it was sinister in its ultimate objective of entrenching British colonialism in India on a fail-safe foundation.
Unlike Bengal, where large landholdings of the Muslims were broken and parcelled out to petty cultivators in Punjab the ordinary cultivator was outrightly shunned. Instead, the imperialists bestowed their patronage, in huge parcels of canal-irrigated and thus perennially fertile land, to a new breed of landed, Muslim, aristocracy they had conjured up for their convenience. A century-and-a-half hence, we in Pakistan are still contending with that imperialist legacy and paying a colossal premium in national disarray and political chaos for that 19th century ‘convenience’.
Imran Ali is a scion of one of the very same landed aristocracies of Punjab. But he is also a political economist who studied at British and Australian universities, taught at many of them, and then settled down to do a painstaking dissection of that intricate web of exploitation that the British imperialists in India had spun to give themselves a stranglehold over a very sensitive region of their prized Imperial colony in India.
With his ears literally plugged to the earth in Punjab, Dr Imran Ali has done research of great scholarly distinction in scouring the historical genesis of the British colonial policies of land distribution in his native land. He has done a dispassionate, cool and well-articulated job of going into the nitty gritty of why the British adopted a method of land management in Punjab diametrically opposite to what they had done in Bengal.
The historical perspective of why the British fostered a new class of landed gentry in Punjab is not so much shrouded in secrecy. Canny colonizers as they were, the British prized the geostrategic importance of Punjab, sharing border with the troublesome NWFP and within hailing distance of Afghanistan where they were locked in the Great Game with Russian imperialism.
The British were anxious to secure Punjab against political intrigues or insurgences of the kind they had encountered elsewhere in India. The wounds of the Sepoy mutiny were still fresh. They had succeeded in putting it down with the help of Punjabi mercenary soldiers recruited for them by petty Muslim middlemen. So they showered their favours in spades on these middlemen when virgin land became cultivable, thanks to the canals. Petty middlemen became aristocrats, overnight. Naturally they were beholden to their masters and readily became their pawns in the imperial game of rapacious plunder.
With the eye of a political economist, Imran Ali has delved deep into the socio-economic fallout of the British scam of sharing of spoils in Punjab with their local cronies. In social terms, this grand land grab spawned a class-conscious and highly stratified social structure. Poor farmers and tillers of the land remained forever at the mercy of their aristocratic masters. The feudal virtually owned their subsistence land tillers and treated them as serfs with no rights or legal protection of any kind. That pattern has not changed much in ‘free’ Pakistan. The landed aristocracy that quickly seized and monopolized the political centre has managed to blunt all attempts at genuine land reforms.
The economic implications of the macabre colonial schemes were equally devastating. The feudal had no interest in farming the lands themselves. So they parcelled out slices of their lands to tenant-farmers who tilled those lands as they had done for centuries. There was no innovation or modernization of farming methods, with the result that benefits that should have accrued from large parcels of well-irrigated lands remained elusive.
Imran Ali has also correctly diagnosed that the British wasted one-third of the new lands in raising horses on fertile acres, which, otherwise, should have vastly increased the farm output. He describes it as the policy of “militarization”. Of course the British needed horses for their cavalry. But that need became redundant in the 20th century with the introduction of mechanized infantry.
However, in liberated Pakistan, the British tradition of ‘militarization’ of land has not only been incorporated without questioning but also vastly expanded in its scope and application. The military overlords of Pakistan — the Bonapartes no less imperious than their colonial forebears — remain firmly wedded to the idea of landholdings for those in uniform. Every general, and even other ranks, has the privilege to acquire fertile and well-irrigated land parcels as a matter of right. The poor farmer is still being short-changed. Take the ongoing struggle of the peasants against the military farm owners in Okara which underlines the plight of the tillers.
Imran Ali laments that the British sowed the dragon’s seeds in Punjab; their devious policies favoured only the chosen few and made no qualitative improvement in the lives of the have-nots. He doesn’t say it, but irrigation in the Punjab has proved to be as much a curse for the ordinary folks as oil is to the layman in the oil-rich Gulf countries. The bounty from the bosom of the land is a blessing only for the privileged few.
The Punjab Under Imperialism: 1885-1947
By Imran Ali
Oxford University Press, Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi. Tel: 111-693-673
Email:
ouppak@theoffice.net
Website:
www.oup.com.pk
ISBN 0195799240
264pp. Rs350
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